Genosha B`gosh and the Holiday Inn Express

Oshawa’s downtown got a major boost last month when developer Abdul Rehman and The World’s Innkeeper announced plans for a downtown Holiday Inn Express, with construction to get underway next spring.

This is great news for a downtown core that has enjoyed some good times in the past decade or so, starting with the GMC and the Consolidated Courthouse and moving on to UOIT-led projects like the Alger Press building; the renovated Regent Theatre; and the Scotiabank-turned Faculty of Education, to name a few.

All those projects have brought – besides hockey players, criminals and students – jobs and more importantly, energy to the city centre, as well as a little style. The Alger Press building, for example, was run-down, tired and abandoned and putting a damper on the property values of its neighbour, the General Motors Centre. Today, with very little effort made to the exterior, it`s a funky, retro-chic home for Criminality and Justice students and a big part of UOIT`s downtown footprint.

Rehman wants an even bigger splash with his proposed six-storey, 125-room hotel, with restaurant, pool, fitness centre and small conference centre, to be built at Queen`s Market Square, currently a municipal parking lot and former weekend flea market, at the corner of Simcoe and Richmond streets.

The deal is chock-full of incentives, with Rehman catching a $90,000 break in building permit fees, as well as cashing in on a special facade improvement grant worth $124,000. There’s also $2 million in tax breaks, spread over 13 years.

I really don`t have a problem with this. We need a hotel in downtown Oshawa and this deal makes it happen. The City risks only its credibility if the deal falls through and that shouldn`t happen because, well, Relax, it`s Holiday Inn. The developer, however, risks a great deal more, so incentives offer a small measure of protection.  It`s the way business and government work and taxpayers will start seeing direct payback over the next 20 years, while the spin-off returns should be more immediate.

But if developers and the City want to start Pleasing People the World Over – or at least in Oshawa – then the next major business announcement for the downtown will have the words `Genosha Hotel` in the headline. Or at least Genosha. I don`t care if it`s a hotel. Just do something.

Most of us know a bit of the history of the Genosha, the city`s first classy hotel. It was the place to be in the late 1920s and into the 1930s (and again during a brief renaissance in the 1950s), though it was a money loser through most of its existence. Before the century was out it had become a seedy strip club – remember the Million Dollar Saloon? – before the City put a stop to peelers in Oshawa by passing a bylaw in 2003.

Since then the hotel has gone through several owners. There was the Korea Exchange Bank of Canada, there was ICC Global Group and then Richard Summers (who has forged a good reputation as a downtown landlord in recent years) and Richard Senechal bought the place in 2009 with a dream of turning it into student housing. Now, apparently, it`s just Senechal, but the building, with its boarded-up windows and desperate, crying need for a good sandblasting, sits back on the market with no nibblers, no progress and little hope.

John Borsberry, the guy who built the Genosha, was described as a man with ``unbounding faith in Oshawa.`` Maybe we need one of those guys. Just don`t tell him Borsberry died four years after the hotel opened, with only a pile of debts left behind.

I just don`t want to hear that The Best Surprise is No Surprise. Go ahead. Surprise me.